So I've been working through the changes for version 5 and have got as far as the Skills in character generation. This is quite a large undertaking! I have been brutal with the pruning, cutting down to the bare minimum of what skills I see the players using. I'm not grouping the trees by skill type anymore. The amount of rules I'm cutting away is humungous - leaving more room for flavour and bionics.

Skills will have a value between 1 and 5 and the caveat with the tree is that a higher epoch skill cannot have a greater level than a lower epoch. Where attribute raising will require you spend RP for the level you're going to, skills are simply 1-for-1.

I'm not sure if I like them being centre-aligned. I'll have a play with that another time.

I'm not really sure I'd go with the epochs on a lot of these. A lot of them aren't strictly dependent on each other. For example, plenty of people learn the ins and outs of Law without delving deeply into history. An abusive mate may know how to Intimidate very well, and may even be great at manipulation (Persuade) but may totally lack Empathy.

With the v5 system it might make for some interesting play to say that the connected skills are allowed to build on each other. So I can use my Streetwise and Streetfighting and combine the skills to get a better roll.

DOC_Agren wrote:Rob, I do have 1 questionWhy is Spacecraft Ops under Empathy

Erm... good question that deserves an answer.

When playing through we realised that the Operations role is a crew management role. You need to know what spacecraft do and how they do it but it also has a human element to get the crew to do what you want. Like persuading but without actually persuading. Does that make sense?

Now that might be a side effect of the way that the player who seems to do a lot of Ops (Matt Wallace) in every campaign plays it but it does seem to fit.

This is different from the Star Trek Operations role, which is really just Data sitting there explaining stuff to the audience. Really useful for the TV show but slightly different to "getting the whole crew working as one".

DOC_Agren wrote:Rob, I do have 1 questionWhy is Spacecraft Ops under Empathy

Erm... good question that deserves an answer.

When playing through we realised that the Operations role is a crew management role. You need to know what spacecraft do and how they do it but it also has a human element to get the crew to do what you want. Like persuading but without actually persuading. Does that make sense?

DOC_Agren wrote:Rob, I do have 1 questionWhy is Spacecraft Ops under Empathy

Erm... good question that deserves an answer.

When playing through we realised that the Operations role is a crew management role. You need to know what spacecraft do and how they do it but it also has a human element to get the crew to do what you want. Like persuading but without actually persuading. Does that make sense?

All the repair skills are either micro or macro. Micro for very small things and Macro for vehicles and spacecraft. There's less skill collection in v5 but more options for using them because the core mechanic is to use the skill and attribute.